President William Ruto reaffirmed earlier remarks that he and azimio la Umoja coalition leader Raila Odinga would not shake hands.
During his visit to Kigali, Rwanda, on Tuesday for the 9th session of the Joint Permanent Commission for Cooperatives, Ruto stated that his willingness to hold dialogue with Odinga was based on resolving issues that had led to the Azimio opposition coalition's violent and chaotic anti-government protests.
The head of state emphasised that Azimio's concerns would be handled through democratic, constitutional, and legal channels.
"As I said on Sunday, in times like this, you have to put your house in order. As president, I owe it to the people of Kenya to provide leadership and on Sunday I did ask the opposition to reconsider calling off the demonstrations they had undertaken because -protests and demonstrations are provided for in the Constitution but they were acquiring an ugly violent turn that was destroying property, putting a lot of lives into risk and a lot of unnecessary chaos," president ruto said
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"I did offer them that whatever issues they had, there were democratic, constitutional and legal channels of raising those issues using the platform of parliament in a bi-partisan and that is the offer I made to the opposition." he added.
The head of state explained his concept of a no-handshake government, stating that his call for peace should be distinct from the initial handshake between former President Uhuru Kenyatta and the former prime minister.
"If I say there will be no handshake, I know there is a context. Unfortunately for us in Kenya, handshake has a different connotation, which is the one I am talking about... The handshake that brings the opposition and government into some problem, a mongrel and an outfit that is undemocratic, unconstitutional and illegal," he said
he added that Kenya is a democracy. It is underpinned by a system of checks and balances where you have a government and an opposition. Our history of the handshake is that there was a fusion of government and resistance, and the results were disastrous for the country.
